drb311

Not just a BuzzFeed article, but a BuzzFeed CATS article. You should be ashamed of yourself.

(But I agree -- BuzzFeed has grown up.)

You're right. I should have said "first internet businesses", and now I have.

I could still be totally wrong, but at least now it's genuine ignorance not a typing mistake.

"Google is a technology-driven company -- one founded by computer science prodigies who have hired more than 50 computer science Ph.D.'s."

In 2002 this was weird.

Internet entrepreneurs were not expected to be compsci Ph.Ds back then.

AVC discussed a new kind of tech CEO recently:

"The new tech CEO archetype is a computer scientist who got into product management early in their career, led large product teams at a big important tech company, is in their 40s, and has great taste in technology, tech talent, and most of all tech products."

Google was one of the first internet businesses to succeed big with computer scientists at the top, leading product.

EDIT, again:

Google is quite a different beast from Sun, SGI, or Viacom. You might disagree but that's OK. Somebody is always wrong on the Internet.

2002 was shortly after the dotcom bubble. Nobody knew what was going on or going to happen. The rise of computer scientist lead consumer-facing tech companies would have surprised people who had expected Pets.com to rule the world.

As the NYT article noted, Google was swimming against the tide at the time. History has proved them right.

If children can thrive in a cave they can thrive anywhere.

Happy and loving children come from happy and loving parents. Enjoy them and do what feels right and kind.

Amazing what 50 bucks can buy.

Are smartphone manufacturers really as naive as the story suggests, churning out phones at a loss in the vain hope of future profit? I know they're in trouble but they're not THAT deluded, are they?

"It just works" is a tricky promise to make good on. Microsoft never made this promise and nor does Google.

As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand identity. It's always celebrated a quirky, rough feel. In some ways, Google is starting to get TOO slick.

People expect Apple to be innovative and reliable; too push the boundaries without ever falling over them. It's hard to do either consistently, successfully, at scale. It might be impossible to do both.

You're awesome.

To make it really authentic, the text that states the artist and track title shouldn't be so sharp. It should look as blurry as the video.

Other than that this is a perfect bit of fun. I love the Internet.

This flow chart explain things that are hard to grasp in words.

Dan Roam's Back of a Napkin is a good guide to thinking and communicating in this visual way. You can get quite a long way with the freebies on his site, but it's worth shelling out for the whole book.

http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/

When I studied the diagram, I found myself running through an imaginary scenario in my head. The Overview text makes it hard to do this. If you don't create a diagram and want to explain a process clearly, don't explain the components -- follow an example action through the process, and your readers will grasp it much better.

Damn that page loads fast.

This is a tarted up version of Guy's 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint:

10 slides -- because that's the max a viewer will hold in their head

20 minutes -- because that's the max people will pay attention

30 point font size, minimum -- because people can read it, and you won't cram too much on

These guidelines are useful for all kinds of presentations because it imposes some structure and some constraint on material.

Like all rules of thumb, smart people see the exceptions.

Monday Note says you only need three slides, which I also like. Broadly:

1. Who we are.

2. What we want to do.

3. How we'll make it work, the money pump.

Guy 10/20/30: http://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule/

Monday Note: http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/05/04/three-slides-then-shut-...

Good breathing will help but it's not the key. The best starting point for nervous public speakers is: http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/10/4/presentation-skills-co...

Focus on their needs not your technique. Everything else is artifice.

I've been trying to shock the monkey for 4 hours now and still haven't won the $20.

It will all be properly announced within a couple of hours but somehow I can't stop myself reading these previews and leaks.

I'll be glad when they set Photos free from Google+. I hope they do something with Hangouts too.

The insight applies to any business: you either help the customer save time or help them kill time.

It was an original, exciting, and ground breaking product in a market that had plenty of unoriginal, boring players.

See also MP3 Players and smartphones. Both markets looked boring and well-trodden until Apple blew fresh air into them.

The key to this kind of success is finding a segment that is currently niche but won't be for ever. Cloud storage, mobile internet messaging, portable MP3s, portable Internet -- all potential mass markets that were kept niche because the products in the market didn't have mass appeal.

There are much better books that do a similar job. Try out Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark and A Sense of Style by Steven Pinker.

Well, Calacanis is much more successful than me so I'm inclinded to think that:

1. Yes, he made the wrong call on Youtube. 2. The habit of making wrong (but still reasonable) calls might be a good one.

My learning from this:

1. Form a view based on the best facts and analysis available at the time. 2. Act on that view. Share it. Be confident. 3. Be ready to change your mind and not worry about having been wrong.

Success is about taking enough good gambles that some pay off. Most people don't let themselves take good gambles, and the value of a few paying off more than pays for a few that don't. If it's not a gamble at all everybody will be doing it.

I'm foxed too. Due diligence is about assessing risk. The lower the valuation the less you're risking. Hence I'd expect early acquires to require far less due diligence. What am I missing?

I googled the question. Weirdly, the answer uses Lincoln's assassination as an example. It was the fulcrum event between new and old. Here's how the inverted pyramid report of his death began:

"This evening at about 9:30 p.m. at Ford’s Theatre, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Harris and Major Rathburn, was shot by an assassin, who suddenly entered the box and approached behind the President. "The assassin then leaped upon the stage, brandishing a large dagger or knife, and made his escape in the rear of the theatre. "The pistol ball entered the back of the President’s head and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal."

http://www.poynter.org/news/media-innovation/12755/birth-of-...

The technological driver wasn't the addition of new media but the telegraph, which meant news stories took on a new urgency -- and editors had to make quick cuts to stories close to print time as they decided which stories deserved most column inches.

Will the Internet kill the inverted pyramid approach? There is no longer any cost associated with column inches printed or characters transmitted.

Contrast the vivid storytelling here with the modern approach taken to JFK's assassination, which begins:

"President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today.

"He died of a wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet that was fired at him as he was riding through downtown Dallas in a motorcade.

"Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was riding in the third car behind Mr. Kennedy's, was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States 99 minutes after Mr. Kennedy's death."

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1122.h...

The JFK story gets us to the facts but quickly bores. Lincoln's takes a while to get going but holds attention right to the end. Masterful.

I'm a Packtian. We're having fun with the title, and we hope the book will help people have fun with OpenCV and learn some useful CV techniques along the way.

Unknown command, Line 1.

The most interesting thing is that even though people complain about the high price, the wallet test shows that real customers recognize the value and are content to pay $99.

The App Store has conditioned people to ASK for a low price, but that doesn't mean developers have to offer one. Any advice that says you should give people the price they ask for is bad -- the optimum price for any product is almost certainly higher than most people would pay. Even 99c apps shift far fewer units than freemium ones.

However I suspect HttpWatch would make even more money with a true freemium model where you pay for the volume of use.

Software can now provide just about any user experience quite easily, so the software industry is now all about figuring out what experiences people want. Is that all he's saying?

It'll still want me to sit at home looking at ads. If it wants to do everything else for me I'm OK with that.

Who cares what it looks like on a big conference-room screen? 99% of viewers are looking at it on a desktop or laptop.

I've always wondered how you can apply the banal "story-telling" presentation advice to slide decks that share detailed information that requires discussion, analysis and thought. Now I know -- you can't.

Emiland has, in fairness, greatly improved the text. "77% less financing volume" is a far better annotation than "77% below". Meeker would be better advised to improve her writing skills. Her design skills are just fine.

Book a car in advance? Stone age!

Google Now will figure out where you need to be, and have a car waiting for you when you open the door.

This line stood out for me:

"They use an Apple because they don't want to use different hardware for work and pleasure."

I'm not a coder, and I don't find the idea of a single machine for work and pleasure particularly appealing. Is there something about software developers that means they like to blur the line between home and work?

Most of the developers I know enjoy coding, and have side projects that involve coding. So code is a skill they use both for work and pleasure.

Is this true for most developers? What other developer behaviours and choices come from that overlap between what they do for work, and what they enjoy doing?

From your answer then we could already improve the author's introduction...

"Go is an open source programming language designed for building simple, fast, and reliable software. It's a good choice where squeezing maximum performance out of the hardware is a primary concern."

Maybe a minor point -- but it makes the book far more compelling to people who will benefit from it, while enabling those who won't to move on.

So given that your choices for high performance is:

"C, C++, Nimrod, Rust, D, Go, ..."

Is there really nothing the author could say to help choose between them?

I wish all these books did a much better job of positioning the language and explaining when you should choose to use it. That seems crucial information, and hard to find out online. The introduction in Go by Example isn't much use:

"Go is an open source programming language designed for building simple, fast, and reliable software."

So that's opposed to all the languages designed for building complicate, slow, unreliable software... OK, I'll bear that in mind.

There are so many viable languages out there now that any introduction needs to give readers informed advice on when it's worth using, and therefore when it's worth learning.

Is there any online resource that does a good job of this, for a wide variety of languages?